Members of the North Hunterdon High School band arrived Thursday in the Boston area for a music festival but set out early for home amid the search for a Boston Marathon bombing suspect, a district official said.

The FBI on Thursday afternoon released photos of two suspects in the bombings, and a night of violence led to one suspects' death and an ongoing manhunt for the second suspect.

The North Hunterdon students had planned on a four-day trip built around performing at the 2013 Festivals of Music at the Duxbury Performing Arts Center. Instead, Principal Michael Hughes decided to have the students return home today once the Boston area's advisory to stay put is lifted, Smagala said in an email.

View full sizeFBI agents gather today in Cambridge, Mass., as part of the search for one of the bombing suspects.AP Photo

With the advisory still in effect, band director

Vincent Angeline arranged for Massachusetts State Police to escort students onto buses and accompany the bus to the main highway out of the Boston area, Smagala said by email.

The latest update is for students and chaperones to return between 7 and 7:30 tonight to North Hunterdon High School.

Hughes was not immediately available to talk this afternoon.

The students were staying in Waltham, a metropolitan Boston city adjacent to Watertown. That's where a firefight in the manhunt begun Thursday night and lasting into today left one of two suspects in the bombings dead. He was identified as Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Authorities were still searching this afternoon for the second suspect, the deceased suspect's younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Authorities in Boston suspended all mass transit and warned close to 1 million people in the entire city and some of its suburbs to stay indoors as the hunt for the second suspect continued. Businesses were asked not to open. People waiting at bus and subway stops were told to go home.

From Watertown to Cambridge, police SWAT teams, sharpshooters and FBI agents surrounded various buildings as police helicopters buzzed overhead and armored vehicles rumbled through the streets. Authorities also searched trains.